"'A little more south,' sir," said the oiler in the stern.

A seat in this boat was not unlike a seat upon a bucking broncho, and by
the same token, a broncho is not much smaller. The craft pranced and
reared, and plunged like an animal. As each wave came, and she rose for
it, she seemed like a horse making at a fence outrageously high. The
manner of her scramble over these walls of water is a mystic thing, and,
moreover, at the top of them were ordinarily these problems in white
water, the foam racing down from the summit of each wave, requiring a
new leap, and a leap from the air. Then, after scornfully bumping a
crest, she would slide, and race, and splash down a long incline, and
arrive bobbing and nodding in front of the next menace.

A singular disadvantage of the sea lies in the fact that after
successfully surmounting one wave you discover that there is another
behind it just as important and just as nervously anxious to do
something effective in the way of swamping boats. In a ten-foot dingey
one can get an idea of the resources of the sea in the line of waves
that is not probable to the average experience which is never at sea in
a dingey. As each slatey wall of water approached, it shut all else from
the view of the men in the boat, and it was not difficult to imagine
that this particular wave was the final outburst of the ocean, the last
effort of the grim water. There was a terrible grace in the move of the
waves, and they came in silence, save for the snarling of the crests.

In the wan light, the faces of the men must have been grey. Their eyes
must have glinted in strange ways as they gazed steadily astern. Viewed
from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtless have been weirdly
picturesque. But the men in the boat had no time to see it, and if they
had had leisure there were other things to occupy their minds. The sun